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A CHILD'S PARENT DIES: STUDIES IN CHILDHOOD BEREAVEMENT. By Erna A. Furman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974, xii + 316 pp., $15.00.
A Child's Parent Dies is the product of many years of cooperative work by a group of child analysts in Cleveland. Over a period of some fifteen years, 23 children who had lost a parent through death were treated by child analysts associated with the Cleveland Center for Research and Child Development. Fourteen were seen in individual analysis. Nine attended the Hanna Perkins Therapeutic Nursery School and Kindergarten where they received "therapy-via-the-parent"—that is, the surviving parent met weekly with a child analyst to discuss ways of assisting the child in coping with his loss.
Mrs. Furman writes: "… we lived with the intense distress, pain, and anguish engendered by bereavement. We have come to understand that this emotional stress is an inevitable burden for all who work with bereaved children. It is essential in facilitating appropriate empathy and insight, and helpful in integrating an intellectual grasp of the psychic processes within the patients' personalities. Only those willing and able to bear the impact with feeling can hope to work with bereaved children fruitfully and to understand them scientifically." This empathic humanism suffuses the book and gives it a depth of feeling all too often missing in the psychoanalytic literature.
The book covers a broad spectrum of topics related to bereavement. To quote Mrs. Furman again: "Work with our patients made